While many providers in the larger home-based care space have struggled with collecting data, MD at Home considers data utilization one of the pillars of its success.

The Chicago-based at-home primary care provider has a proven track record of leveraging clinical data and enhancing the lives of its patients.

That’s according to Ahmed Morsy, MD at Home’s director of clinical operations.

“Every single thing that happens with a patient we are aware of, by using our data,” Morsy told Home Health Care News. “Whether it’s to develop a care plan, to schedule patients for providers or coordinate communication with our care team members, we use data in our daily operations.”

The company also relies on data to help foster and build relationships with home health care providers, labs and other partners that provide ancillary services.

MD at Home provides primary care to about 7,000 homebound patients in the Chicagoland area. It mostly serves a low-income patient population, most of which are Medicare/Medicaid eligible.

For over a decade now, MD at Home has worked to provide quality at-home care to vulnerable patients with the main goal of reducing admissions to hospitals and other brick-and-mortar facilities.

This year, the company is expanding beyond Chicago for the first time.

“Within the next 12 months, we’ll be in Florida,” Morsy said. “The need exists in parts of the country like Florida. [Specifically], we’ve heard there is a need for practices similar to our operation: Providers that utilize data, apply population health and are patient-centered. We studied the markets and recognized that Florida was our best first stop and our launching ground for a more national expansion.”

Morsy added that by building strong relationships with partners and keeping open dialogues, MD at Home was able to carefully consider where to expand first.

“With our relationships in this community, we were approached by different entities who asked us to expand to wherever else they were,” he said. “We have considered a national expansion as part of our future and we felt like this was time to do that based on the need that we see.”

As MD at Home expands, one challenge to overcome is the lack of resources for the patients it serves.

Behavioral health and other specialty services, for example, are areas MD at Home has been focused on over the last several years.

“There is a significant lack of resources in these communities that comes into play when you need specialists to come into a patient’s home,” Morsy said. “Psychology, psychiatry and behavioral health are the biggest needs for these patients. And it goes without saying that staffing continues to be a struggle for us and the industry as a whole.”

MD at Home has actually been able to escape some of the worst staffing shortages brought on by the public health emergency. It did so by being a reliable partner to the agencies that depended on it, according to Morsy.

“I think we kind of surpassed that by having great communication with the home health agencies we work with and by leveraging the data that we collect and by sharing that with our partners,” he said. “That’s helped us be innovative and dependable.”

Looking ahead, Morsy believes there’s a great opportunity in educating the public on the need for home-based primary care.

“Educating the payers on the importance of home-based primary care [is big],” he said. “By leveraging us and what we can do for home health agencies, that helps them deliver care to those patients and reduce some of the burdens that they have on the facility side. That way, those facilities can focus on the higher-acuity cases.”

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